What political leaders say about disability reflects whose rights are prioritized and how equitably education systems serve students with disabilities. This paper presents a systematic discourse analysis of public statements about people with disabilities made by White House and Cabinet officials, and proposed federal bills affecting individuals with disabilities during 2025. Using structured, AI-supported methods grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis and the human rights model of disability, we collected, validated, and scored statements and bills on a 4-point scale ranging from valuing (4) to dehumanizing (1) people with disabilities. Of 121 validated public statements, 73.6% were deficit-oriented, critical, or harmful: 39.7% included hate speech or ableist language, and 33.9% employed a critical or deficit-based frame. In contrast, 92.0% of disability-related bills ( n = 32) reflected valuing language, although education-specific bills were more negatively framed, with 42.9% using a deficit lens. Findings are discussed in relation to students’ federal educational rights.
This article examines how the politics of survival and resistance shape the terrain of profit from educational technologies (edtech) during COVID-19. Drawing on the cases of Chicago Public Schools in Chicago, Illinois, and Orange County Public Schools in Orlando, Florida, we argue that almost all aspects of schooling were corporatized due to the perceived necessity of virtual solutions to address the crisis. This corporatization occurred as school districts directed an unprecedented infusion of federal funding into Big Tech and edtech companies with limited overt resistance from teachers’ unions, families, and community organizations. These groups were understandably more preoccupied with resistance related to life-and-death matters, alongside pressing concerns about learning loss. These forces illuminate a phenomenon we call the edtech exception: Technology companies exploit the particularities of a crisis, positioning themselves as providing essential and exceptional solutions, thus maneuvering under the radar of public accountability and broader resistance to educational privatization.
Teacher and student ethnoracial match increases the likelihood of student academic success. This study explores whether assignment to teachers in grades 9 through 12 who either share students’ ethnoracial background or are teachers of color is associated with attendance or academic achievement in high school, and with college enrollment. Using linear probability models and administrative data from New York City Public Schools for students who graduated between 2017–2020, we find a positive relationship between the share of ethnoracially matched teachers and student attendance rate and GPA for Asian and Latine students and a negative relationship for Black students. One explanation for our findings is that there may be differences between Black students with a high versus a low share of Black teachers. Finally, the likelihood of student college enrollment was not related to the proportion of teachers of the same ethnoracial background nor the proportion of teachers of color.
This paper examines disparities in AP ® STEM course availability using the complete population of AP audit records (2015–2019), joined with NCES data on the characteristics of U.S. public high schools in operation during the period (N = 21,139). It examines: (1) how the number of AP STEM courses offered varies by geographic locale, and (2) how the availability of specific AP STEM courses differs across locales. Results show that rural and town schools offer fewer courses—both in terms of the total number of courses available and the likelihood of offering each course. The rural/town availability gaps are smallest for core-adjacent STEM courses and largest for high-math-demand courses. Regional and local variation in these gaps reveals the uneven distribution of secondary advanced STEM opportunities across the United States. Findings highlight the need for targeted efforts to expand the availability of advanced STEM coursework, particularly in rural and town high schools.
This study investigates the relationship between college major choices and labor market outcomes, with particular attention to racial minorities and immigrants. Building on research on major–occupation alignment, we focus on two dimensions: linkage , the extent to which majors are concentrated in specific occupations in the labor market, and match , whether individuals work in occupations closely related to their majors. Using American Community Survey data, we find that earning bachelor’s degrees in majors with strong linkage is associated with higher earnings—particularly for workers in matched occupations—and lower unemployment. Notably, Black, Hispanic, and foreign-born workers appear to benefit more from major–occupation alignment than White and U.S.-born workers, though these relationships differ across immigrant destination contexts. Overall, the study findings provide descriptive evidence that racial and nativity differences in earnings and unemployment are smaller among individuals with majors tied to specific occupations and who work in jobs related to their majors.
This article examines Michael Apple’s theoretical contributions to the field of education, with particular attention to his epistemological principle of relational analysis, his understanding of the State as a site of contestation, his use of Gramscian concepts of hegemony and common sense, and his analysis of educational policy as cultural politics. Drawing on Apple’s foundational 1992 article, “The Text and Cultural Politics,” this article argues that Apple’s analytic tools remain indispensable for researchers seeking to understand how power operates in and through educational institutions. I demonstrate how Apple’s framework enables researchers to move beyond economistic determinism while retaining a commitment to structural analysis and critique and how it opens space for understanding agency and counterhegemony in educational practice. The article concludes by pointing to the ongoing relevance of Apple’s contributions for researchers engaged in critical educational policy studies today.
This study investigates how elementary school teachers’ anxiety with regard to teaching mathematics relates to their interpersonal behavior in teacher-student dyads. Building on Interpersonal Theory, we conceptualize teachers’ behavior in two fundamental dimensions: communion (warmth, sensitivity) and agency (control, guidance). A total of 162 elementary school teachers (129 women) self-reported their behavior toward individual students, yielding descriptions of 2,238 teacher-student dyads. Multilevel structural equation modeling revealed that mathematics teaching anxiety was unrelated to agency but was associated with weak communion in teachers’ self-reported interpersonal behavior. These findings suggest that mathematics teaching anxiety is linked to low-quality teacher-student interactions. We discuss how teachers can manage their anxiety in ways that prevent it from manifesting as unfavorable interpersonal behavior toward their students.
Integrating data science into K–12 education requires accommodating its interdisciplinary nature in the traditionally subject-based curriculum structure. This makes it essential to examine how existing educational standards adequately support or fall short of supporting the learning of data science. This study investigates how data science concepts align with five nationwide educational standards for grades 9–12 in the United States: the Computer Science Teachers Association standards, the Next Generation Science Standards, Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and for English Language Arts and Literacy, and the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies. We conduct qualitative content analysis to identify the manifest and latent connections between the five standards and core data science topics. The findings reveal opportunities and challenges for the interdisciplinary integration of data science content both within and across subjects, providing a foundation for developing future integration roadmaps.
Increasingly children spend the period of rapid development between ages of 3 and 5 years in group-based learning settings. To unpack the timing and sequence of skill growth during this period, we use piecewise growth modeling with longitudinal data on 154 children participating in 2 years of public prekindergarten. We consider whether growth patterns differ across four learning domains as well as between children who are dual language learners versus monolingual English speakers and children beginning prekindergarten scoring lower versus higher at baseline. We generally observed positive growth in all domains across all time points, with the exception of spring of the second year, when we observed limited growth. Although there were few differences in growth patterns by children’s language status, children who scored lower at baseline grew faster than those with higher baseline scores. The implications of these findings for prekindergarten programs looking to consistently promote all children’s learning are discussed.
Motivated by recent tragedies highlighting teacher stress stemming from parental demands, this study examines the relationships among teacher–parent communication, teacher autonomy, principal leadership, and well-being in South Korea. Using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA 2022) with school fixed-effects models, we find that increased hours spent communicating with parents are negatively associated with multiple dimensions of teacher well-being. Furthermore, we uncover a critical autonomy paradox: Although perceived autonomy generally enhances well-being, high levels of autonomy significantly exacerbate the negative association between communication hours and well-being. We also reveal that strong principal instructional leadership fails to mitigate this paradox and may even intensify the perceived burden. These findings challenge the assumption that autonomy and leadership function as protective resources. Instead, within high-pressure contexts and bureaucratic systems, autonomy and leadership may operate as managerial devices and sources of personal liability, characterized by isolated responsibility rather than professional support.
This study examines how discourse on Twitter shaped public perceptions of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) following its 2021 letter to the Biden administration requesting federal assistance amid threats at school board meetings. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and the concept of political spectacle, we examined 447 tweets posted over the course of 1 year to uncover the dominant narratives and the discursive strategies Twitter users employed. Our findings reveal that Twitter users employed strategies such as misrepresentation and selective emphasis to construct a dominant narrative portraying the NSBA as a “woke” organization that colluded with the Biden administration to target parents. These narratives coincided with widespread backlash and the withdrawal of multiple state associations from the NSBA. This research highlights the powerful role of social media in shaping educational politics and policy discourse, offering insights into how digital platforms mediate public understanding and influence institutional legitimacy.
Item orientation—whether agreement with a survey item indicates higher (positive) or lower (negative) standing on a construct—can influence the factor structure of psychological assessments in education research. This study investigated how item orientation affected inferences about the factor structure of students’ epistemology in history because previous studies consistently measured factors of epistemology with uniformly oriented items within factors and polarized item orientation across factors. We administered a survey comprised of positively and negatively oriented items for three previously hypothesized dimensions of student epistemology—complex, tentative, and integration beliefs. We used confirmatory factor analysis to examine how different approaches to handling item orientation affected conclusions about the factor structure of epistemology. First, we replicated the factor structure of epistemology in prior research using a subset of uniformly oriented items within factors and polarized item orientation across factors, finding similar fit and small inter-factor associations as seen in previous research. Second, we introduced items of mixed orientation to measure each factor and found that model fit became poor. Third, we simultaneously modeled substantive and method factors, resulting in improved model fit. The method factor explained more variance than substantive factors, indicating item orientation was a significant confound. When controlling for a method effect (i.e., item orientation), associations among epistemology factors were large and positive, suggesting that previous findings of roughly orthogonal epistemology factors may result from offsetting negatively associated method factors and positively associated substantive factors.
School choice policies purportedly empower families to select schools for their children and incentivize educational quality. However, these policies yield mixed effects on student achievement and school improvement, which we posit is at least partly due to inequities in factors shaping families’ decision-making processes. We propose an interdisciplinary theory examining the interplay between parental decision-making, choice system features, and enrollment outcomes. Drawing on theory and evidence from economics, psychology, and sociology, we explore how information, constraints, preferences, and social, economic, and cultural capital influence families’ choice system navigation. We also emphasize the importance of parental perspectives regarding schooling, including how families’ values and cultural practices shape their preferences. Lastly, we consider how centralized and decentralized system characteristics—like timing and complexity—shape participation and amplify inequities. Our model provides directions for future research and practical guidance for designing choice systems that reduce barriers and better support all families.
State-funded pre-K programs have proliferated over the past several decades. Many states have relied on a mixed-delivery approach, wherein pre-K is provided across diverse childcare settings, including public schools, community-based organizations, and private childcare centers. Leveraging data from a natural experiment (2001–10) of North Carolina’s Pre-Kindergarten Program, we assessed county-level variation in the allocation of funded slots to different pre-K settings and the dispersion of slots within or across centers. We found that heterogeneity in the implementation of the mixed-delivery system had minimal effects on children’s fifth grade achievement, suggesting fairly consistent effects across the system. When small differences emerged, they suggested that North Carolina’s Pre-Kindergarten Program funding was most beneficial for student achievement when allocated to private for-profit and nonprofit centers.
This study uses the COM-B framework, which conceptualizes Behavior change as shaped by Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation, to examine how teachers in rural Lesotho integrated an offline digital library into their instructional practice over a 3-year period. Drawing on 60 interviews, we identify how increases in digital and information literacy capabilities, supportive physical and social opportunities, and both reflective and automatic motivation shaped teachers’ adoption and sustained use of the library. Participants described greater confidence with technology, improved access to instructional resources, and encouragement from peers and school leaders, which they reported contributed to shifts in lesson planning, classroom instruction, and collaboration. Although the analysis centers on COM-B, we also note teacher-reported outcomes such as improved student understanding, engagement, and digital skills, which appeared to reinforce continued use. The study contributes to research on teacher behavior change in the Global South and offers insights into conditions that support meaningful technology integration in low-resource contexts.
This exploratory mixed-methods classroom study investigated the use of ChatGPT in International English Language Testing System (IELTS) writing preparation classrooms, focusing on a) the reliability of holistic scoring, b) the actionability of feedback, and c) teacher and student acceptance. Specifically, it compared three model variants (ChatGPT 4, 4o, and 4o mini) to examine whether scoring and feedback performance were stable across commonly accessible versions within the same artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem. Data were collected from Chinese IELTS teachers, native-English-speaking IELTS teachers, peer student raters, and IELTS essay writers in an advanced-level preparation context. Quantitative analyses examined score reliability and the frequency of actionable feedback across IELTS writing domains, while qualitative analyses of feedback and interviews identified recurring patterns in feedback characteristics and user acceptance. Five themes emerged from interview data: utility and functionality, perceived reliability of scores, actionability of feedback, concerns about over-reliance, and balancing AI with human oversight. Findings suggest that the tested ChatGPT variants generated relatively reliable and actionable feedback for surface-level features (e.g., grammar, spelling, lexical choice), but showed limitations in evaluating context-sensitive and higher-order dimensions (e.g., argument depth and creativity). Participants generally viewed ChatGPT as a useful supplementary tool rather than a replacement for teachers. Practical implications for integrating AI and human feedback in IELTS writing classrooms are discussed, and important limitations related to sample size, proficiency range, single-prompt design, and model version currency are also acknowledged.
Student absenteeism surged during and after the pandemic, harming engagement and achievement. We evaluate the impact of Washington DC’s High-Impact Tutoring (HIT) Initiative—designed to mitigate learning loss through targeted academic supports—on student absenteeism. Using daily attendance data and a within-student fixed effects design, we find that students were 1.2 percentage points less likely to be absent on days they were scheduled for tutoring, a 7.0% reduction. Bundling key features of high-impact tutoring, such as in-school delivery, smaller tutor–student ratios, and increased frequency of sessions, further amplify the effect. These results highlight HIT’s potential to boost engagement while promoting equitable access to supportive learning environments.
Early childhood educators in the United States earn considerably less than their K–12 counterparts, and, among early educators, teachers of color earn less than their White peers. However, the drivers of these wage gaps are not well understood. Using data from a unique, large sample of early educators ( N = 18,383) working in sites that receive public funds in Virginia, we document significant racial and ethnic pay gaps. These wage gaps persist across models that account for a more comprehensive set of relevant variables than previous research, including sector and geographic region as well as teachers’ role, education, and experience. We found that, on average, White teachers earned $19.51 per hour, $1.43 more than Black teachers and $1.15 more than Hispanic teachers. While sector, region, and teachers’ roles, education, and experience were all correlated with racial and ethnic wage differences, differences persisted not only across models that accounted for these factors but also in models comparing educators working in the same site.
Career and technical education (CTE) teachers are unique because they often enter teaching with previous workplace experience in industry. In this paper, we link employment and earnings data from unemployment insurance records with data on staffing and certifications for incoming CTE teachers in Washington state to provide a descriptive look at CTE teachers’ entry into the profession. We find that previously employed CTE teachers see substantial pay increases, about $13,000 in annual earnings on average, upon first entering teaching. These increases were widely felt across prior industries but were particularly large for CTE teachers entering through traditional pathways and, among teachers entering through the state’s Business and Industry pathway, for CTE teachers coming from industries with lower average pay.
